When the results of the 1981 National Survey of Homeworking were published ( Hakim, 1984, 1985, 1987b, 1988a), they aroused controversy because
they revealed a picture of homeworking very different from the one being
offered at the time by local and national pressure groups ( Rubery, 1989: 52; Phizacklea and
Wolkowitz, 1995: 31-2). There was feminist and left-wing
political resistance to the conclusions that many homeworkers were men;
that most women homeworkers did not have young children at home; that
white-collar jobs greatly outnumbered low-paid manufacturing homework
jobs; that rates of pay and earnings varied a great deal rather than homework
being universally poorly paid work; that the majority of homeworkers
seemed to be self-employed and often worked for a variety of employers
rather than being clear-cut cases of dependent labour working for a single
employer on a continuous basis; that most homeworkers were satisfied with
their jobs; and that homeworkers had negative views of trade unions, seeing
them as organizations that served the interests of well-paid male workers,
with little or no interest in the problems of low-paid female workers, especially if they worked part-time and on an intermittent basis at home. All these
results were questioned, doubted, and rejected, by trade unions, pressure
groups, and academics sympathetic to them, on the basis of local studies
which necessarily had small and unrepresentative samples and concluded
that homeworkers were women, forced to work at home by childcare responsibilities and hence exploited by unscrupulous employers ( Allen and Wolkowitz, 1987; Huws, 1994; Phizacklea and
Wolkowitz, 1995). However,
all studies of homeworking undertaken since the 1981 National
Homeworking Survey have in fact confirmed the results of that first nationally representative survey of homeworkers ( Huws, 1994; Granger,
Stanworth,
and
Stanworth, 1995; Phizacklea and
Wolkowitz, 1995; Felstead, 1996; Felstead,
Jewson, and
Goodwin, 1996; Felstead and
Jewson, 1997; Stanworth and
Stanworth, 1995, 1997), even those explicitly designed to
overturn those findings ( Phizacklea and
Wolkowitz, 1995; Felstead, 1996).
Furthermore, cross-national comparative studies and research in other countries have generally produced broadly similar pictures of manufacturing and
white-collar homework towards the end of the twentieth century ( Hartmann, Kraut, and
Tilly, 1986: 144-7; Morokvasicet al., 1986; Varesi and
Villa, 1986; Applebaum, 1987; Boris and
Daniels, 1989; Rodgers and
Rodgers,

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